Real Life by Kitty Burns Florey

Hugo, crouching by the hibachi. He wore cutoff jeans. His legs were thick and pink—babyish. He wore a black T-shirt and the Red Sox baseball cap Rachel had brought him. “Oh, hell, Rachel, I wish I liked him better.” Dorrie turned back to look at her own legs dangling off the dock. If she were pregnant, she thought, she would look like a stork, puffed up plump above skinny legs and knobby knees. “He can be charming sometimes, and he’s very bright, but he’s just so empty, Rachel. He gives me the willies. He never does anything on his own but sit down here poking sticks into the water. Or he rows—around and around the pond. And he eats. And that’s all—that’s absolutely all.”
    He had been with her not quite three weeks. There had been four shopping trips into town; once he had helped her unload the kiln; they had toasted marshmallows one night over the hibachi while she told him about pottery making, and the next day she had given him a lesson on the wheel and let him glaze a couple of mugs and bowls. He had decorated them sloppily with slashes and arrows and lost interest before he was half done. They had driven into town to see a movie. On the way there, Hugo had chattered about other movies he had seen; on the ride home he’d been silent. They had had several arguments about what he ate: too much junk, not enough vegetables, Dorrie chided him. Hugo claimed she never made anything he really liked and he had to fill up on dessert. And they had argued about the television. He offered to mow the lawn for her, to pay for one; she told him he would have to help mow the lawn anyway, and she certainly couldn’t afford to pay him. After conversations like this, he took refuge in the boat, or sat down on the dock looking at the water for hours and hours, and Dorrie sat inside with her lonely anger, unable to concentrate on working or reading, unable to do much of anything but indulge in vain wishes that things were different.
    â€œWhat about summer camp?” Rachel asked her.
    â€œI don’t know anything about camps, Rachel. And they’re expensive. And it’s undoubtedly too late.”
    â€œHe can’t be as idle as he looks, if he’s an intelligent kid. He must think a lot.”
    â€œHe doesn’t have anything to think about. And his conversation, to say the least, is not the conversation of a thinker. Just about all he can talk about is his favorite soap opera. His one passion in life.”
    â€œWhich one?”
    â€œ Upton’s Grove , for God’s sake.”
    â€œI used to watch that.” Rachel sat up, smiling, and took a long drink of beer. She was a short-story writer, beginning to be known, her first book on the verge of publication. Dorrie still had moments of disbelief in the Rachel who had emerged after their suffering adolescence, when they were in their twenties: attractive to men, sure of herself, almost glamorous. Everything she did had a shine to it, even watching a soap opera. What was dreary or pathetic in other people became magical when it happened to Rachel: desertion, divorce, overweight, rejection. Dorrie had observed her all these years with wonder and curiosity, and with intermittent hope that was always dashed but always lurking somewhere: if good things could come to Rachel, who used to be ugly and cynical, who spent entire summer vacations in tears over her pimples and braces and flab, couldn’t they come to Dorrie too? And yet they didn’t, so that her fondness for Rachel was tinted, faintly, with bitterness.
    â€œWhen William left me and I was so depressed I couldn’t eat or work or sleep,” Rachel said, “I got pretty involved with good old Upton’s Grove .”
    â€œI vaguely remember this,” Dorrie said. She could remember clearly, in fact, Rachel’s flamboyant depression; even that had had charm, had caused all sorts of people to rally round.
    Rachel laughed.